In the past I’ve put up a picture each year of my flower pots and hanging baskets. Here is this this years display which I’m rather pleased with, it’s been drawing good comments from neighbours and passers by.
Walking
No, you’ve not gone mad if you’ve read this before but it now seems a bit different. I keep doing things to get the blog looking and running as I want and in doing this forgot the name of the databse I was using and backup up the wrong one before deleting! Thanks to Google’s cached version I’ve been able to recover all but this posting. Anyway, here’s roughly what I wrote.
I had a fellow bus driver and blog commentator on my bus to Salisbury yesterday, he was going to walk the Clarendon Way from Salisbury to Winchester. As I drove back to Winchester I mused on this and came to the conclusion that parachuting and walking have much in common. In the first you jump out of a perfectly safe and satisfactory aircraft in order to do it yourself, in the second you abandon a perfectly good transport system like rail or bus and do it yourself as well. I then congratulated the un-named walker on his achievement after he e-mailed me to say that he’d completed the walk.
Jeff then posted a comment which identified him as the walker. Cogi responded saying he didn’t ever think it could have been Gillers getting off his fat arse! Jeff came back to say that Gillers does do some walking – from the Railway station to the Jolly Farmer :-)
Not a good day
Second day back from our trip to France and all the nice chilled out feelings got knocked out of me this evening. On the way home I stopped at Waitrose to get some dinner things and was driving in the car park when the car in front stopped, I too stopped about 8′ behind this car, a 2006 525 BMW. I then saw the reversing lights illuminate ……… please, no! My thoughts weren’t enough to prevent it starting to reverse so I blew my horn long and hard, it was still sounding as the BMW hit me with a pretty firm thud. Of course I got out and had to answer the stupid question “Is you car damaged?”. “Yes, the concave front is not a standard feature of the Land Rover Discovery”! I also asked a question “Didn’t you hear me blowing my horn. I see you you’ve got reversing sensors didn’t they alert you?” To which there was a perfectly rational answer “My daughter was playing the music so loud I didn’t hear anything”. I’m now wondering how much her story will vary from the truth when it comes to her insurance company. Will it become “I was stationary and this Land Rover Discovery rammed me from behind? By the time I’d looked at my vehicle and started the conversation with the other driver anyone who’d seen it happen had disappeared.
Cathy Buckle’s letter from Zimababwe
Dear Family and Friends,
On the side of the main highway near Harare there’s a hand painted sign on a piece of battered tin. ‘Bricks 4 Sale,’ it says, the message wedged into a forked stick. Standing in a forlorn heap alongside are the very bricks. Its a sad little assortment of rubble: lumps of red, odd sized, second hand bricks with eroded edges, cracks and chips and some even with splotches of white paint on them.
A few kilometres away a very battered blue pick up truck with no number plates and a seriously twisted chassis is below a bridge across the main road collecting water from a stream. The stream bank is full of litter – plastic bags and drinks bottles, broken glass and beer tins. In the back of the truck there’s a huge white plastic container that must hold a thousand or more litres. Three women and four men are working in a line with buckets, pouring murky water from the polluted stream into the water tank.
A little further along the road a crooked tree branch is propped up with chunks of cement, a thin plank nailed onto the top. Standing in a line along the plank are six old plastic jam jars. They have no lids and are half filled with a murky brown liquid. “HUNEY†is the sign that’s written in charcoal on a stone nearby.
A group of soldiers stand right in the road trying to wave down a lift and as you swerve to avoid them you see how very young they are, almost children still and yet wearing army camouflage. No private cars stop, no one knows who’s who these days. The big 4×4’s flick past, windows closed, doors locked, huge aerials swinging. On their car doors are the stickers announcing that they are the people keeping Zimbabwe alive, the international aid organizations.
Strange scenes are everywhere in our broken country after a decade of collapse, even in upmarket suburbs. Rounding a corner in a quiet residential neighbourhood its not unusual to come across a great gathering of people. At the hub is whichever house in the street is fortunate enough to have a borehole, and whose owner is gracious enough to share. A hosepipe over a wall fills countless buckets, tins and twenty litre plastic containers. Patiently men and women wait for a share, some carrying their containers in aching hands, others pushing wheelbarrows and hand carts.
Even with such abnormality around us, not to mention the disgusting scenes of hooliganism at the constitutional conference recently, there are little glimmers of light
coming into view. The removal of 20 US cents worth of government levies from fuel is one, the lifting of import duty on newspapers, mobile phones and computers is another. A breath of fresh air is blowing into our country and lets hope it turns into a gale and blows away what newspaper owner Wilf Mbanga calls Yesterday’s Men. Until next week, thanks for reading, love cathy
Phew!!!!!
I may appear to have been a bit quiet for some days but believe me I’ve been swearing quite loudly!
Just over a week ago, and about 60 minutes before we were off to Cheddar for a weekend, I got an urgent call from my ISP; someone had hacked into my website and converted it into a phising site. The sort that pretends to be a bank and then wants to confirm your passwords etc. which are then forwarded onto the criminals behind all this. I had two options a) Pay my ISP £75.00 +VAT per hour to clean all my files, or b) Do it myself. I opted to do this myself which is why the site was inaccessible last weekend – it couldn’t stay up as a phising site. On Monday I went through every file removing code which had been inserted into many files, I’m not very competant with php coding but did my best. End result was that by the end of Monday I’d managed the job, my ISP was satisfied that all exploits had been removed and I was back up again. Hurrah!
Next I had to think about how to prevent this happening again. I can’t be sure but I think the hacking was done via the ‘Comments’ facility within my blogging software, this where some of the code was and also where the site itself didn’t act as it should. I wasn’t really able to repair and restore as original these files. The software was pMachine which is now obsolete having evolved into ExpressionEngine. It seemed logical to move the site onto using ExpressionEngine software but as I did this I found I didn’t like ExpressionEngine much anyway, plus it didn’t import the previous data very well even though it wasa direct replacement for pMachine. WordPress seems to be the major player but it has no import facility for pMachine databases. However, Googling found a way it may work and by jove it’s worked. There’s a lot more I want to do but at last I’ve got an up and running blog on WordPress now.
A taste of Heaven
I’ve been to Heaven today, liked what it’s like, and want to go back. So, from now on I’m not going to mutter under my breath everytime a passenger with a concessionary free pass only wants to go one stop, I wont get annoyed at the first passenger of the day offering a �20 note for an 80p fare, l’ll be patient when a passenger with a pushchair flags my bus down and wont take my advice the board the bus right behind me which is a low floor and onto which the pushchair can boarded with child in it, I’ll feel priviledged that they want so much to travel with me that they’ll spend 5 minutes folding the pushchair while the low floor bus overtakes me. Being this good will surely get me into heaven?
“What was Heaven like?” you must wonder. My heaven was lunch here. I’ve had some very good meals in very good restaurants which include meals personally cooked by Garry Rhodes, Albert Roux and Giorgio Locatelli as well as dinner at Raymond Blanc’s Manoir au Quatre Saisons. And this was every bit the equal of them and maybe a hair’s breadth ahead! The cost was 50% of one week’s take home pay (for the two of us) but worth every euro cent of it.
After this superb meal we drove up the coast for a few kilometers and took a walk in very warm sunshine along a beach. If my location in the left hand column still shows my location as La Moularderie that’s where we walked.